Does America really need another coming-of-age story? Cynics will say no:
Everything about growing up has been said in Huckleberry Finn, Catcher
in the Rye, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Although these
classics still resonate deeply, modern life changes so rapidly that our writers
have to scramble to interpret the ever-evolving experience of adolescence.

As a consequence, the last decade
has seen a glut of novels and memoirs dealing with the subject. Some are good;
a few are great: Tom Perrotta’s Bad Haircut: Stories of the Seventies and
Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life, to mention two. Short story writer and
novelist Kevin Canty adds to this growing field, bringing a valuable new voice.

His first story collection, A
Stranger in this World, features some of the most memorable and, at times,
disturbing views of modern adolescence. In the story “Blue Boy,” the main
character, a lifeguard named Kenny, almost allows a boy to drown because he’s
too stoned to notice. Another character, Paul from “Pretty Judy,” finds himself
seducing an attractive retarded woman, not knowing whether his actions are
right or wrong.

“I guess if I had one subject
that overrides a lot of these [stories],” Canty said in an interview during his
book-tour stop in Minneapolis, “it would be identity—looking for an identity.
‘Who am I? How do I put a self together?’ And once you’ve constructed yourself,
you do something that your constructed self can’t recognize. How do you
assimilate that? ‘I’m a good person; I’m not that kind of person.’ And yet you
did that; and yet you caused that. What do you do when you don’t know yourself
anymore? Those are the moments I’m really interested in.”

Canty’s characters constantly
redefine themselves because of changing situations. The main character of
Canty’s new novel, Into the Great Wide Open, is a revised version of the
Kenny in “Blue Boy,” and he struggles to adapt himself to his problematic
seventeen-year-old mind and body.

Jaded, overly analytical, and way
too cool for words, Kenny plays a kind of stoned Holden Caulfield. At the
novel’s start, he meets Junie on a “Liberal Religious Youth” weekend retreat
that their parents have forced them to attend. The two quickly pair off, and
during the next nine months they become each other’s repository for pain,
jealousy, and, sometimes, love.

If all this sounds too familiar,
well, that’s the point. Canty hits all the hot spots: teen sexuality, familial
neglect, alcoholism, suicide attempts, and, of course, pregnancy. But Canty
treats these subjects with a rare insight—and sense of humor—achieving a level
of immediacy that jars the reader into recognition.

Written in the third person—but
limited to Kenny’s field of vision—Into the Great Wide Open explores
adolescent self-perceptions and the ways in which teens reconcile this vision
with their skewed worldview. The novel follows Kenny’s thought processes, going
into his mind to record his observations, which are often faulty.

“A lot of times these things
happen,” Canty says, “and [Kenny] doesn’t see it. There’s this delayed decoding,
where he’ll only figure out later, ‘Oh, that’s what was really going on.’ In my
life, often, the important things happen, and I don’t really realize it at the
time. It’s only later, in some kind of retrospect [that things make sense]. But
Kenny’s so jammed up in terms of experience—a lot of times he’s really running
on instinct. He doesn’t quite know why he’s doing things, and he keeps making
judgments about himself, and about half of them are wrong.”

But Kenny keeps trying, sounding
out different versions of his imagined self in his head. He goes through
several drafts of each observation, and Canty uses intricate and often
hilarious wordplay to record these thoughts. As Kenny struggles to find the words,
he gets nearer to his own truths and to his own identity.

“I guess I believe in language as
a means of controlling the world,” Canty says. “Whether you’re a writer or a
cement block salesman, finding a word that’s adequate to your situation—finding
out, ‘Oh, yeah. That’s what I am’ or ‘That’s what this is’—is a really
fascinating process.”

This attempt at self-mastery
through language recalls James Joyce’s A Portrait of an Artist as a Young
Man. The wordplay, the excursions into the character’s consciousness, and
Kenny’s megalomania all resemble Joyce’s treatment of the young Stephen
Dedalus. But unlike Stephen, Kenny is not based on the author’s own younger
self.

“I don’t think he’s
autobiographical,” Canty says. “You take snippets of your own life. You have
to, because this is the only experience of being a human being that I’m ever
going to have. So you’ve got to base it somewhere. And a lot of the furniture
of adolescent life in [the novel] is similar to my own high school catastrophe.
… I dropped out of high school. I was kind of a disreputable jerk. But he’s
really a made-up character. … It’s all just lies.”

Canty ends the novel on an odd
note, leaving Kenny in a situation that’s as ambiguous as it is final. The
question looms for the reader: What will Kenny do with his life? With Kenny’s
gift for words, the most obvious future for him would be as a writer, but Canty
was reluctant to give such an easy answer.

“I don’t know,” Canty says. “In
some sense, I’ve deliberately left his world past the end of the book
unexplored…. This wordplay makes me think he’s somebody who could be engaged by
[writing], but I kind of left his future up for grabs.”

In the first chapter of Max Phillip’s debut novel, Snakebite Sonnet, the
ten-year-old protagonist, Nick Wertheim, attempts to suck the snake venom out
of the nineteen-year-old Julia Turrell’s leg. “If Julia had to die for me to
suck her leg,” he thinks, “then it was worth it. I’d die too, of course; fair’s
fair… I couldn’t bear to spit Julia’s blood on the ground, so I swallowed,
thinking, Better Not.”

Although the snakebite wasn’t poisonous, this scene introduces perfectly Nick’s obsession with the venomous Julia. A stranger to Nick’s halcyon childhood, Julia dazzles with her fast lifestyle—her wild clothes, her poetry, her lovers—and Nick is snared at first
glance: “The first time I saw Julia, I wanted to lie down with her, though I
was 10 years old and had no idea why I wanted to lie down with her, or what I
might do about it once I had.”

What follows are twenty-one years
of sheer agony, in which Nick plays puppy dog to the oblivious Julia. He misses
out on all of life’s normal milestones, because Julia’s overwhelming predominance
in his life eclipses all other influences. Because he meets her before puberty,
she marks his sexual awakenings, and all his future desires entail her. He
never learns to fall in and out of love; he never learns to be independent; and
although he goes through all the motions, he never develops a wholly singular
identity.

Although Nick’s obsession is the
central issue, Phillips never allows Snakebite Sonnet to fall into the
monotone that obsession so easily brings. The novel is intense but also subtle,
building and layering to create a vision of human weakness that transcends
Nick’s single narrative voice. Phillips employs innumerable visual and tactile
cues—snakes, sisters, and lots of sex—sending the reader deeper and deeper into
novel: farther, in fact, than Nick’s own understanding of the story.

Perhaps Phillips’ most
interesting accomplishment is the novel’s intricate construction. Arranged into
fourteen chapters, Snakebite Sonnet is both a poem and a novel. A line
from Julia’s “Snakebite” sonnet heads each chapter, and it’s difficult to
separate cause and effect: Because Julia gives Nick her sonnet, does the sonnet
dictate the novel’s structure, or vice versa. Like Italo Calvino’s If on a
winter’s night a traveler, which uses a similar device, Snakebite Sonnet
is an intricate game with endlessly circling signifiers. But the game’s
power is never overshadowed by technical cleverness.

Although this novel’s overt
narrative deals exclusively with memory, it’s ultimately about redemption; it’s
about the future and how to move into it. But it’s not an easy redemption, nor
an ideal one. Nick knows he’ll never fully recover from Julia, and like a
heroin addict, he “chooses life” at the cost of a great compromise.

With its 300 pages of anguish and
frustration, this novel’s overall effect is draining. It leaves a void in the
reader’s mind and heart, but this void—like the dull ache of loss—is more
welcome than any answer that the novel could possibly give.

Like his character Julia,
Phillips amazes with his luxury and extravagance. His narrative resources and
poetic gifts are already fully formed, making Snakebite Sonnet one of
the finest and most heartbreaking debuts in recent memory. The only problem is
that this novel is so good, so exhausting, and so all-encompassing that it’s
hard to imagine anything beyond it.